WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 72

ance of fresh bread, giving civil defense experts a firsthand glimpse of the effects of bread deprivation
on civilian populations. Although it would have made more sense to airlift light, nutrient-dense foods
instead of heavy flour and the heavier fuels needed to bake it, officials observing the situation in Berlin
quickly concluded that, in times of crisis, “ample freshly baked bread … was essential to civilian mor-
ale.” Later, they would apply this lesson to U.S. civil defense planning, which stressed the importance
of bread supplies. 12
Things did not go as well in Czechoslovakia. In 1948, Truman's failure to extend bread grain ship-
ments to East-leaning Czechoslovakia was credited with pushing the country definitively into the Soviet
camp, and the president publicly vowed never to allow something like that to happen again. In a water-
shed speech, the president demanded quick passage of the Marshall Plan, which at first consisted largely
of stepped-up bread grain shipments. In the same speech, the president called for universal peacetime
military training and the reestablishment of the Selective Service system. With bread grains leading the
way, the country was going to (cold) war. 13
SOMETHING BETTER
In a June 1952 commencement address, President Eisenhower, despairing at the country's decline into
Red-baiting and topic banning, implored Dartmouth College graduates “to fight Communism with
something better.” But, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted, increasingly visible poverty and
racial tensions were “ruining” the United States' image abroad. The country's Cold War propaganda ma-
chine was struggling to speak convincingly of America's lofty ideals. It was getting harder and harder
to point, concretely, to what “something better” America could offer the world. 14
To make matters worse, by the end of the 1950s, the United States appeared to be losing ground to
the Soviets in almost every arena that mattered—education, science, technology, weapons. Every arena
except consumer goods and food production, that is. In this context, visions of domestic consumer af-
fluence displaced Freedom and Equality as the most important weapon in U.S. propaganda efforts. 15
U.S. efforts to combat the appeal of Communist “workers' paradise” with glamorous images of life
in a “consumers' paradise” filled with sleek Chevrolets, color TVs, automatic dishwashers, and Popu-
luxe living room sets have been well documented. 16 The important role that industrial food played in
creating the image of America as the land of plenty is less well known, and it is unclear how much U.S.
food-related propaganda affected target audiences in the USSR, Western Europe, Asia, and Latin Amer-
ica. It did seem to work on Americans: even as confidence in the superiority of U.S. military readiness,
technology, and education wavered at home and abroad, Americans picked up on the idea that their abil-
ity to produce and consume abundant food set them apart. Industrially produced food was “something
better” the United States could offer a hungry world.
During the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, where Vice President Richard Nixon
famously accused Nikita Khrushchev of making lousy dishwashers, U.S. newspaper headlines across
the country positively crowed over the way American food “dazzle[d] Ivan.” Modern food processing
was “our secret weapon”—“the newest weapon in America's fight against communism.” 17 “Johnny”
might not be able to read as well as “Ivan,” as Rudolf Flesch warned in his best-selling attack on the
U.S. educational system, but few Americans doubted that Johnny could eat better than his Soviet coun-
terpart. Speaking at a U.S. Information Agency symposium on food and the Cold War, Campbell's Soup
Company president William B. Murphy captured this spirit: “The best example of the American dream
of plenty is in food. … Communism is utterly incompatible with the production of food.” 18
To be sure, U.S. food propaganda typically focused on more glamorous modern food concoc-
tions—TV dinners and ready-mix cakes—but industrial bread was basic and U.S. industrial foodways